Redbox Hits 2 Billion Rentals With “Drive”

Movie-renting kiosk company Redbox has just announced a major milestone. When you combine all their rentals, both movies and games, Redbox has dished out over 2 billion discs.

“We’ve always known how much America loves easy, affordable entertainment, and today we can prove it two billion times over,” said Scott Di Valerio, CFO of Coinstar, Inc. and interim president of Redbox. “Just 18 months ago, we rented our one billionth DVD and we couldn’t be more excited to celebrate this remarkable second rental milestone with our customers.”

Apparently, Redbox’s growth has boomed in the last little bit. The company was founded in 2002, but wasn’t focused on their current objective until 2005 when Coinstar bought a significant stake in the company. So Redbox basically rented their second billion discs 4 times faster than their first billion discs.

According to Redbox, that magical 2 billionth disc was the Ryan Gosling thriller Drive, which was rented at a kiosk outside a McDonald’s in Philomath, Oregon.

So, this is a milestone for Redbox. But customers get to join in on the celebration by grabbing a free rental on March 8th (that’s today). All you have to do is enter the promo code “THANKS2U” and you’ll receive your free movie. If you want to upgrade to a Blu-ray of a video game, you can use the code to get a standard DVD rental’s price off.

Redbox has had some run-ins with Hollywood in recent months. After Warner Bros doubled their window on new releases to rental companies like Redbox and Netflix, Redbox refused to wait that long. They are currently purchasing Warner Bros. DVDs from retailers at a higher premium to avoid the 56-day waiting period.